Politics & Power Quote by Edgar Rice Burroghs

Burroughs gives romance the teeth it usually files down. "I loved her. I still love her" lands like a vow, then immediately swerves into confession: he curses her in his sleep. That sleep detail matters. It suggests love and hate aren’t tidy, chosen positions; they leak out when the conscious mind stops managing the story. The line isn’t pleading for sympathy so much as staging an internal civil war.

The sentence’s real engine is the pivot from private obsession to public catastrophe: "so nearly one are love and hate" becomes a thesis about power, then scale-jumps to "man, nations, life". That escalation is classic Burroughs-era pulp ambition: the personal melodrama is never just personal; it’s an origin story for violence. He’s writing in a cultural moment steeped in empire, masculinity as destiny, and the idea that individual passions can justify conquest or collapse. By linking a bedroom emotion to national behavior, the quote smuggles in a bleak political psychology: the same energy that binds you to someone can be rerouted into destruction, and societies do that rerouting all the time.

There’s also a subtle self-exoneration buried in the symmetry. If love and hate are "nearly one", then cruelty can masquerade as devotion, vengeance as loyalty. The phrasing lets the speaker feel doomed by forces larger than himself - "the two most powerful and devasting emotions" - while still savoring their intensity. It’s less a moral lesson than a warning about how easily passion becomes a permit.